Conservative billionaire Peter Thiel floated a bizarre conspiracy theory about Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein.
During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the PayPal co-founder shared his evidence-free speculations about Epstein and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, speaking at length about his “straightforward alternate conspiracy theory.” He argued in essence that the sex offender financier may have advised Bill Gates to create the non-profit to protect his assets during his eventual divorce from Melinda.
After admitting he doesn’t “have all the details in this figured out,” Thiel proceeded all the same.
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“Bill and Melinda get married in 1994, they don’t sign a prenup, and, you know, something’s going wrong with the marriage,” he said. “And maybe Melinda can get half the money in a divorce. He doesn’t want her to get half the money. What do you do?”
“The alternate plan is something like… You commit the marital assets to this nonprofit and then it sort of locks Melinda into not complaining about the marriage for a long, long time,” Thiel continued. “And so there’s something about the left-wing philanthropy world that was… some sort of Boomer way to control their crazy wives.”
Earlier in the interview, Thiel—who also said he’d met Epstein—claimed that Bill Gates had “supposedly talked to Epstein early on about how his marriage wasn’t doing that well.”
“Epstein suggested that he should get a divorce circa 2010, 2011,” Thiel claimed, again without evidence. “Gates told him something like, you know: ‘That doesn’t quite work,’ presumably because he didn’t have a prenup.”
“So there’s one part of—Epstein as a marriage counselor, which is sort of disturbing,” Thiel said. “The second thing that we know that Gates talked to Epstein about was… all the sort of collaborating on funding, setting up this philanthropy.”
“Makes sense,” Rogan repeatedly said in response to Thiel’s ramblings on Gates.
There is nothing to suggest there is any truth to Thiel’s theory or that he believes it himself.
Bill and Melinda Gates divorced in 2021. In a CBS interview the following year, Melinda cited Bill’s meetings with Epstein when discussing the “many things” that led to the breakdown of the marriage. She said she’d made her feelings about the meetings clear to her Microsoft co-founder ex-spouse, adding that she too had met Epstein once and found him to be “abhorrent” and “evil personified.”
Bill Gates has expressed regret about meeting Epstein and denied there was any relationship between the financier and his foundation. Epstein died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. New York City’s medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
